( 7 10 
I November, 
ANALYSIS OF BOOKS. 
Insect Variety : its Propagation and Distribution. Treating of 
the Odours, Dances, Colours, and Music in all Grasshoppers, 
Cicadas, and Moths ; Beetles, Leaf-insects, Bees, and Butter- 
flies; Bugs, Flies, and Ephemeras; and exhibiting the bear- 
ing of the science of Entomology on Geology. By A. H. 
Swinton, Member of the Entomological Society of London. 
London : Cassell, Petter, Galpin, and Co. 
By way of introduction to the present work Mr. Swinton gives 
us a history of the causes which led to its being undertaken. 
The account of his entomological rambles gradually extending 
from Hampshire, Surrey, and Kent to France, Italy, and more 
distant regions, and of his researches into insect life, beginning 
with the capture and determination of British species, and thence 
passing to observations on the modifications of forms due to 
differences in food or in climate, has about it the true aroma of 
fields, the woodlands, and the mountains. To elder naturalists 
especially it will suggest pleasant memories of the past. He 
repeatedly laments the disappearance of many of the rarer and 
more beautiful butterflies from England — an extirpation due not 
so much to the mere spread of cultivation and enclosure as to 
the greed of dealers and their emissaries and to the mania for 
British specimens. He anticipates — not without reason — that 
in the future our insedt hunters will be “doomed to a sport com- 
posed of an influx of Colorado beetles, white butterflies, Hessian 
flies, and woody oak-galls/’ He notices the strange fadt how, 
with little difference of climate, the fauna of the northern coasts 
of France is so much richer and more diversified than that of 
Kent or Sussex. Have the species thus missing in Britain 
arrived in or been developed in France subsequent to the sepa- 
ration of the two countries, or have they since become extindt on 
the northern side of the Channel? Italy he considers has fewer 
attractions for the entomologist than for the artist and the anti- 
quary. All the more attractive butterflies seem to keep to the 
Swiss pastures and the Sicilian high grounds, — the latter a 
locality where the traveller may be himself “ collected ” by 
brigands. “ The bare-backed Apennines and fertile Maritime Alps 
are equally ignored by Italian savants ; a few varieties of our 
northern favourites perchance grace Florentine gardens, and 
around Pisa you may just capture enough Diurni to convince 
yourself you are abroad.” The following passage will give our 
readers a fair idea of the author’s manner: — “The end of the 
